High Water - Hardcover

Lynn Hightower is the author of six previous novels, including Satan's Lambs, which won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. She studied creative writing with Wendell Berry at the University of Kentucky and holds a degree in journalism. She lives in Tennessee.

I was angry with my mother the night that she died. Angry because I had been made to feel guilty, frustrated, and helpless. Guilty because her life seemed to me a form of undeserved hell; frustrated and helpless because she would not change it according to my dictates.

The drive to the hospital is etched in my memory -- the flat, tarry pavement, a straight stretch down highway 17, the newly settled dark riding softly on the treetops and sandy soil. I think of that drive as the last normal moment, before the slow, heart-nailing realization that the things I took for granted, the things everyone takes for granted, did not hold true. But I did not look, then, to find treachery among my own. You don't look for bloodstains, or double bolt the doors, when you know it's only family coming.